Christmas Elves

The new Ballroom Couple are a two person Social Committee, and organized a hall party on our hall for Christmas Eve. This despite the fact that they do not live on our hall, but no matter, it was great to have a party. Each of the rooms was open to all, with snacks and drinks inside. There was kind of a sad moment when the new Ventriloquist who no one had met came back to his room, took a look at the gathering of semi-drunk people farther down the hall, sneered, and went into his room. I was told about this second-hand, and like to think if I had been a witness I would have invited him to come join the party. However, I was never sure which was his name and which was his dummy’s, and also he is perhaps the worst ventriloquist I have seen on the ship, which is not an easy title to win. He not only uses his own voice for his dummy’s voice, but he also moves his lips when his dummy talks. Beth closed her eyes during his show and wasn’t able to discern who was talking to who.

Maybe it was because the egg nog was flowing, but I treated the party as a chance to come clean with a lot of the people who I hadn’t really met. For example, I confessed to the new costume designer that when I had walked into the dressing room earlier in the week and she was steaming the costumes and I had said that I was looking for a magazine that I had left in there, I was lying. I was in fact hoping to borrow one of the costume coats for a video bit Sue was doing. She said that she knew I had been lying, and we both agreed that I should have told the truth.

I spent a lot of time talking to the Former NFL Cheerleader and her husband, the Gymnast, about their wedding and acquiring a green card. The Gymnast is now a U.S. citizen but he was born in Russia (he was the 1990 Russian Gymnastics Champion but blew out his knee before the 1992 Olympics, so was unable to compete!). Much as I had suspected, the movie “Green Card” has done nothing but create a false impression of what a couple has to go through to get one. The Former NFL Cheerleader even said that everyone kept telling her that her husband would have to know what kind of face cream she uses (the crucial question that Gerard Depardieu messes up in the movie). Most of the questions, however, ended up being about living on the ship, so all of their studying was for naught.

The Former NFL Cheerleader is best friends with the female half of the Ballroom Dance Couple, and the Ballroom Dance couple were Maid of Honor and Best Man at the wedding. The thought of a wedding between a Cheerleader and Gymnast Champion, attended by Canadian Ballroom Dance champions, was just too much for me to process. I imagined that the reception was like the end of “You Got Served” (playing on the crew channel today, worth watching if only for Jackee’s reaction shots at the end), with groups of dancers constantly one-upping each other. I asked them all about this later and the Ballroom Dancers said that whenever they go to a wedding they are asked to “do a little something” by somebody, usually one of the couple’s mothers. This request puts them in an uncomfortable situation, because they don’t have the right shoes etc. and it’s difficult to graciously decline. The Former NFL Cheerleader said things weren’t all that different from a normal reception at her own, thus dashing my images of Battle Dancing, except that at one point she looked over and realized a group of her family was watching her new husband drunkenly try to do a handstand on a chair. This story made me resolve to get invited to a former gymnastics champion’s wedding immediately.